Dell’s End-to-End Solutions Help Tippett Studio Bring the Mysteries of the Universe to Life on COSMOS: A SpaceTime Odyssey

Dell’s end-to-end solutions enable Tippett
Studio, the Academy Award®-winning visual effects studio, to bring
the wonders of the universe to life in living rooms across the country
in the celebrated science documentary series COSMOS:
A SpaceTime Odyssey.

A re-boot
of Carl Sagan’s original series, COSMOS explores how we discovered the
laws of nature and found our coordinates in space and time, bringing
these concepts to life with cutting-edge visual effects digitally
rendered to appear realistic. With Dell solutions, the Tippett team is
able to save invaluable time while retaining state-of-the-art
performance when developing the complex visual graphics that tell the
stories on COSMOS. Prior to working with Dell, Tippett Studio was
hindered by a costly, outdated IT infrastructure that struggled to
support the complexity of their work to create photorealistic animations
and effects.

"The biggest challenge working on COSMOS was for Tippett to meet the
consistently tight deadlines—and meet them under a lean, television
budget,” said Sanjay Das, chief operating officer, Tippett Studio. “With
the massive and complicated effects in almost every one of our 235
shots, this was a very demanding task, especially to do at an
exceptional level that lives up to the prestige and history of COSMOS.
With the power of Dell solutions, Tippett was able to quickly render and
refine images to deliver the realistic and compelling sequences that
have helped made this series a huge success.”

Tippett Studio is still running on the same scalable solution that Dell
designed for it two years ago, chosen over HP and Apple, which has grown
with the studio. Tippett has been able to quickly and efficiently
increase capacity by adding a server rack, enabling the studio to take
on additional projects while meeting the growing demands of visual
effects. Tippett’s recent work includes A Million Ways to Die in the
West, The Twilight Saga, Ted, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows.
The company currently is in production on Ted 2 and Jurassic World.

The world of visual effects production and animation is driven by
quick-turn deadlines. The scalability of Dell hardware and optimization
of Dell solutions have helped Tippett Studio respond to challenging
client requests in a timely fashion. For example, to have the trademark
“Ship of the Imagination”—used by COSMOS host Neil deGrasse Tyson as a
narrative device—travel through space, across other planets and
everywhere in between while looking plausible, required the studio to
reflect images and effects off the ship in a complex and dynamic fashion.

The Tippett team worked with scientists and producers to pull together
the initial concepts of each segment and shot. After learning from the
experts, Tippett Studio began designing, rendering, refining and
completing the breathtaking images of the universe’s wonders, such as
the microscopic Tardigrade water organisms.

Using Dell
PowerEdge servers, Tippett studio is able to pack an immense amount
of processing power in a small rack space to optimize its rendering farm
when creating detailed, layered graphics. Dell
Networking’s high-performance S4810 network switch provides Tippett
Studio with peace of mind knowing that all applications are running
smoothly in its high-performance computing environment. The entire setup
is protected from threats by the Dell
SonicWALL Network Security Appliance E8510 next-generation firewall,
which features integrated advanced intrusion prevention, granular
application control, high-performance SSL inspection and secure remote
access.

Dell Precision
workstations with NVIDIA GPUs take the graphics load off the core
CPU and provide massive acceleration that facilitates rendering,
allowing complex 3D scenes to be rendered in real time. Tippett Studio
estimates that the performance of Dell Precision workstations saves five
to 10 hours per shot when rendering complex images such as the
prehistoric reptile, Ichthyostega. The alligator-like creature requires
adjusting rendered, composite shots to ensure it looks accurate while
building on existing footage to make it seem as if the Ichthyostega is
swimming in water and demonstrating realistic characteristics.

“It’s a great relief knowing that we have a technology partner in Dell
that understands the complexities of our IT infrastructure and the time
sensitive demands of our clients,” said Tippett’s Das. “With the time we
save leveraging Dell solutions—whether rendering or at other stages of
our workflow—our team can focus their energy on producing their best
creative output instead of worrying about system administration issues.”

About Dell

Dell Inc. listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and
services that give them the power to do more. For more information,
visit www.dell.com.

Dell, Precision, Latitude and are trademarks of Dell Inc. Dell
disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.

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